including solitary confinement, execution, and torture. How far should we bend to authority and public anxiety in this work ? Will we avoid responsibility, or will ...
NEW DIRECTIONS IN ARCHITECTURAL ETHICS
Arthur Allen This article was first published in the Journal of Architectural Education, May, 2003, vol. 56-4, and is reprinted with permission of the publisher.
On May 5th, 2002, The Edmonton Journal (1) published a trenchant article, “Hard Time, Hard Cons”, by Dan Gardner, reporting on controversial “super-max” prisons developed in the United States and now in use or under review in two Canadian provinces. Gardner’s article prompts questions about the functional, moral, and ethical implications of the architecture of confinement. In considering these questions, I conclude that both enhanced ethical education and behavioral research will be needed if the architectural profession is to deal adequately with some difficult decisions ahead. In 1957, when I graduated and went to work, I was anxiously, yet naively, optimistic about my new profession. My youthful idealism lasted for three months, was badly shaken by an encounter with an old asylum, then improved slowly during five years of work on innovative
mental hospital design and construction. In the 1970's I read “Pushing Prisons Aside” (2), and Robert Sommer’s 1976 book, The End of Imprisonment. (3). Both publications discussed prison reform, and challenged architects on possible abandonment of incarceration as a response to crime; but since that time prison construction in North America has boomed. I did not wait for September 11th, 2001, to be shaken by that escalation of public fear and its impact on my profession. I was ready, and remain more convinced than ever that the architecture of confinement, in its several forms, poses moral and ethical dilemmas for architects. These concerns are comparable to those faced by doctors dealing with genetic testing and the use of placebos in drug trials, as well as by scientists grappling with the moral complexity of biotechnologies, such as therapeutic cloning. In designing facilities for confinement - for use by psychiatric, juridical, immigration, refugee, security and military agencies - architects face difficult moral decisions. When public pressure demands tough treatment, we will often be
confronted with the morality of providing spaces for officially sanctioned brutality, including solitary confinement, execution, and torture. How far should we bend to authority and public anxiety in this work ? Will we avoid responsibility, or will we place professional decisions beyond the reach of anger and revenge, and design on the basis of empirical evidence and humanitarian values? I believe that architects must face this future with the conviction that all their work supports and represents the clients who commission the work. It follows that if we are proud to represent the moral successes of benign clients, then we must be ready to share the burdens of those who are less benign in intention. For example, if excessive use of imprisonment under brutal conditions aggravates the incidence and severity of crime, then architects ought to work for changes in prison design programs, or refrain from serving dysfunctional institutions. Architects have long been concerned about the ethics of sound building and business practice, and for 150 years they have talked as if good, clean, pure design would alone improve human behavior. In the 19th century John Ruskin said that ”Taste is not only a part and an index of morality - it is the ONLY morality”. (4). Since that time architectural aestheticism has prevailed seemingly accompanied by moral
indifference to the failure of massive asylums, housing projects, and prisons. But times keep changing; the demolition of the dysfunctional Pruitt-Igoe housing project in St. Louis, along with recent developments regarding the ethical and legal responsibilities of architects in relation to preserving natural environments, have pointed out new directions for architectural ethics. The way will not be easy, but I am optimistic, based on the following observations: 1. In 1990 the Royal Institute of British Architects prepared a report recommending research and postoccupancy evaluation of the performance of prisons. It suggested that ”prison conditions .... could be considerably and speedily ameliorated if fewer people were sentenced”. The report also regretted the absence of data-sharing among prison architects, and urged community and international consultation on prison design and operation; (5) 2. Intense criticism continues regarding excessive use of civil incarceration. In a CBC radio interview, June 10th, 2002, criminologist David Garland, author of Culture of Control, predicted that the overuse of imprisonment will fail in the
United States, because of its ineffectiveness and high cost, and because it contradicts ideas of justice dear to the American people; 3. Corrections Canada and European jurisdictions prefer to operate small institutions based on a “direct supervision” model rather than on the anti-social model of super-max design and operation. A few American authorities are testing the direct supervision concept. Corrections Canada also publishes articles by environmental psychologists on architectural design and human behavior in its institutions; 4. Some American architectural educators now use the methodology of applied ethics in architectural training. Recent publications in this area include The Ethical Architect, by Tom Spector, (6), and Ethics and the Practice of Architecture, by Wasserman, Sullivan, and Palermo, (7). The latter provides comprehensive guidelines and case studies applicable to a wide variety of ethical problems, and was supported by the American Institute of Architects. Aided by environmental psychology, this new work in ethics is relevant to the architecture of confinement, and will go
far in preparing challenging world.
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At this end of my career I still worry, but I find encouragement in the words of Margaret Somerville, an educator in medicine, law, and ethics at McGill University. Her presentation at a Montreal symposium, (published in Architecture, Ethics, and Technology, (8), edited by Pelletier and Perez-Gomez, challenged architects’ preoccupation with the idea that ”good aesthetics mean good ethics”, and urged us to travel on with hope, optimism, and courage. I agree, and this time believe that my aged optimism will turn out to be wisdom.
Date written, 2002 Published, 2003
1.
2.
Notes
Addenda, August, 2011
Gardner, D., (2003), Hard times, hard cons, Edmonton Journal, (May 5th), pages D4, D5
June 20th, 2005; The Christian Science Monitor Sara Miller, staff writer, wrote that California had built 33 new prisons from 1984 to 2005; no more were planned. Only 12 had been built from 1852 to 1984. She added that the end of prison expansion …”is also symbolic of a departure from the tough-on-crime mind-set that has dominated the politics of prisons for the past 30 years…..states are placing greater emphasis on rehabilitation….to help prisoners transition back to society,”…..
Martin, W., (ed), (1973), Pushing Prisons Aside, The Architectural Forum, (March), Vol 138, #2, pages 29-51
3.
Sommer, R., (1976), The End of Imprisonment, New York: Oxford University Press.
4.
Ruskin, John; Quotation not located in Ruskin’s writings, taken from; Barzun, J., (1975), The Use and Abuse of Art, Princeton and London: Princeton University Press, page 42
5.
Report on Prison Design, for Lord Justice Woolf (November 1990 R), London: Royal Institute Of British Architects, page 1, Report obtained from the RIBA, publication unknown.
6.
Spector, T., (2001), The Ethical Architect, New York: Princeton Architectural Press.
7.
Wasserman, B., Sullivan, P., and Palermo, G., (2000), Ethics and the Practice of Architecture, New York: John Wiley and Sons.
8.
Somerville, M., (1994), Ethics and Architects: Spaces, Voids, and Travelling-in-Hope, in Pelletier and Perez-Gomez, (eds), Architecture, Ethics, and Technology, Montreal and Kingston: McGill-Queens University Press, page 67.
June 3rd, 2009; Toronto Globe and Mail; Howard Saper, Canada’s federal correctional investigator, warned that ……”the Harper government’s tough-on-crime agenda could swamp already strained prisons”…… November 2010; the Canadian Centre for Policy Alternatives published a report; The Fear Factor; Stephen Harper’s Tough on Crime Agenda. The author, Paula Mallea, indicated that 13 new federal prisons were contemplated, with a budget of 5 billion dollars, and that numerous new laws would have cumulative effects on financial costs. Mallea wrote; Tough measures do not produce public safety. Longer sentences, harsher prison conditions, and the incarceration of more Canadians will return the system to a time when prisons were extremely violent, and when the end result was more rather than less crime.
